Iris Calderhead

Iris Calderhead
Portrait photograph, c. 1917
Born(1889-01-03)January 3, 1889
Marysville, Kansas, U.S.
DiedMarch 6, 1966(1966-03-06) (aged 77)
Tucson, Arizona, U.S.
Other namesIris Calderhead Pratt
Alma materBryn Mawr College, University of Kansas
OccupationSuffragist
Spouses
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(m. 1918; died 1931)​
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(m. 1941)​

Iris Calderhead (January 3, 1889 – March 6, 1966[1]) was an American suffragist and organizer in the National Woman's Party.[2] She earned an A.B. in English from the University of Kansas in 1910 and completed a graduate degree at Bryn Mawr College in 1913.[3] She was the daughter of William A. Calderhead, the congressional representative for Kansas' 5th District from 1895 to 1911.

Education and academic work

Calderhead attended the University of Kansas from 1906 to 1910, graduating with an A.B. in English. During her time at the university, she was a member of Pi Beta Phi, a fraternity dedicated to the educational advancement of women.[4] In 1910, she published an article in the journal Modern Language Notes and began graduate studies at Bryn Mawr, having won a fellowship there.[5]

From 1910 to 1911, she was a Graduate Scholar in English, and from 1912 to 1913 was a resident fellow in English.[6] She spent the summer of 1913 at the University of Chicago[7] and returned to Marysville to teach English and science.[6] In 1916, her work on Middle English appeared in Modern Philology, publishing for the first time several fragments of early morality plays.[8]

Activism

Calderhead became involved in the women's suffrage movement after meeting Doris Stevens and Lucy Burns, leaders of the Congressional Union, in New York City. Her first assignment in 1915 was to help organize the Union's exhibit at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition and the Women's Voter Convention.[9] Calderhead was willing to travel extensively to advocate for suffrage.[10] "I came a long way to work for the union because national suffrage seems to me the biggest political issue before the country," she explained. "I think I ought to be able to convince others of this."[11]

In 1916 Calderhead, in her role as secretary of the Congressional Union of Kansas, sent a letter to the House Committee on the Judiciary, informing them that on March 15, the fourth Kansas district Republican Convention had adopted a resolution favoring women's suffrage.[12] In August that same year, the NWP dispatched teams to states that had already granted suffrage to mobilize support for a federal amendment for women's suffrage.[13] Calderhead was sent to Arizona, which had granted women the right to vote in 1912, along with Vivian Pierce, Ella Thompson, Helen Todd, and Rose Winslow.[14] The group met resistance from the Democratic Party, which opposed women's suffrage, and Calderhead reported that members of the party tried to ban the suffragists' meetings.[15] She also traveled to Oklahoma to recruit supporters,[16] telling a reporter for the Tulsa World that "We women of the [enfranchised] West must try to put ourselves in the places of the women of the great industrial centers of the East. These are the women for whom we are making this fight for freedom. It is literally that – a fight for liberation."[17]

In June 1917, Calderhead was arrested at the Smithsonian Institution, where she and fellow organizer Elizabeth Stuyvesant planned to display a banner during a visit by President Woodrow Wilson.[17] On July 14, 1917, Calderhead was arrested again for picketing the White House during the Silent Sentinels demonstrations and served three days in the Occoquan Workhouse.[18]

From January to June 1918, Calderhead conducted a speaking tour through Colorado, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania; she was sent on the tour by Alice Paull to promote the National American Woman Suffrage Association.[19]

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed women's right to vote in the United States in 1919,[20] but Calderhead's activism did not stop then. Neither did her marriage in 1918 (even though it was uncommon at the time for women to remain politically active after marrying.) By the 1930s, she was working out of what is now Belmont–Paul Women's Equality National Monument as the Director of the National Woman’s Party campaign to force the newly created World Court to protect the rights of women around the world.[21] In 1932, she spoke on the issue before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs.[22] During the Great Depression, she was an official at the Consumers' Counsel Division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration[23] and authored the 1936 report "Consumer Services of Government Agencies".[24]

Personal life

Iris Calderhead was born January 3, 1889, in Marysville, Kansas, to Alice Gallant Calderhead and William A. Calderhead, a Civil War veteran and a multi-term U.S. Representative; before his political career, he was a teacher, a lawyer, and served as the prosecuting attorney of Marshall County.

While in Colorado during her 1918 speaking tour, the 25-year-old Calderhead met and married the 71-year-old local "Renaissance man," John Brisben Walker,[25] and moved to his residence in Morrison, Colorado. (She married Walker despite widespread criticisms of suffragists getting married.[21]) In 1919, newspapers reported that Calderhead and her husband were launching a socialist newspaper.[21] She was at Walker's side when he died in 1931.[26]

In 1941, she married her college classmate, Wallace Pratt, a petroleum geologist who by that time had become vice-president of Standard Oil.[27] The two moved to Pratt's home in McKittrick Canyon in far West Texas and built a new house there. The house was designed to look like an oil tanker at sea (a tribute to Pratt's long career in the oil industry), with the entrance door painted a bold purple, the color of the women's suffrage movement and National Woman's Party.[28] The Pratts moved to Arizona in 1963, so that Calderhead could receive treatment for arthritis.[29]

Calderhead died March 6, 1966, in Tucson, Arizona.[1] In accordance with her wishes, she was cremated, and her ashes were scattered by her husband in McKittrick Canyon,[27] a place she loved.

Even though she was married to a highly prominent oil executive and had been out of the public eye for decades, the New York Times chose to lead her obituary with describing her legacy and not her husband's:

"Mrs. Iris Calderhead Pratt, once jailed briefly for picketing the White House as a suffragette when Woodrow Wilson was President, died yesterday."[1]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "MRS. WALLACE PRATT, EARLY SUFFRAGETTE". The New York Times. March 8, 1966. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  2. ^ Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the United States Congress. U.S. Government Printing Office. 1932. p. 14231.
  3. ^ Kansas, University of (1914). Bulletin.
  4. ^ The Arrow of Pi Beta Phi. Pi Beta Phi Fraternity. 1909.
  5. ^ The Arrow of Pi Beta Phi. Pi Beta Phi Fraternity. 1911.
  6. ^ a b Bryn Mawr College Calendar. Bryn Mawr College. 1914.
  7. ^ Chicago, University of (1913). Annual Register.
  8. ^ Calderhead, Iris G. (1916). "Morality Fragments from Norfolk". Modern Philology. 14 (1): 1–9. doi:10.1086/387035. ISSN 0026-8232. S2CID 161064286.
  9. ^ "Marin Journal 9 September 1915 — California Digital Newspaper Collection". cdnc.ucr.edu. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  10. ^ "Iris Calderhead | Turning Point Suffragist Memorial". www.suffragistmemorial.org. Retrieved August 23, 2017.
  11. ^ "The Milwaukee Journal – Google News Archive Search". news.google.com. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  12. ^ Congress, United States (1916). Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the ... Congress. U.S. Government Printing Office.
  13. ^ "Suffragists Timeline: 1916". groups.ischool.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on August 15, 2016. Retrieved July 14, 2016.
  14. ^ "Detailed Chronology National Woman's Party History" (PDF). Library of Congress. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  15. ^ Adams, Katherine H.; Keene, Michael L. (2007). Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. p. 151. ISBN 9780252074714.
  16. ^ "Oklahoma Woman's Suffrage Association | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture". www.okhistory.org. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  17. ^ a b Moursund, Fallon. "Biographical Sketch of Iris Calderhead". Biographical Database of Militant Woman Suffragists, 1913–1920.
  18. ^ Stevens, Doris (1920). Jailed for freedom. New York. p. 369. hdl:2027/mdp.39015009198824.
  19. ^ "Editor Marries Suffragist Wedding Secret for Month". The Rocky Mountain News. November 10, 1918.
  20. ^ "19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women's Right to Vote". National Archives. January 25, 2016. Retrieved March 11, 2022.
  21. ^ a b c "Iris Calderhead Pratt". U.S. National Park Service. Retrieved January 21, 2026. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
  22. ^ Committee, United States Congress House Foreign Affairs (1932). Permanent Court of International Justice: Hearings Before the... Seventy-second Congress, First Session on H.J. Res. 378, May 6, 1932.
  23. ^ Scroop, Daniel Mark (2009). Mr. Democrat : Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 86. ISBN 9780472099306.
  24. ^ Calderhead, Iris (1936), Consumer Services of Government Agencies (report), Agricultural Adjustment Administration
  25. ^ "Editor Marries Suffragist Wedding Secret for Month". The Rocky Mountain News. November 10, 1918.
  26. ^ "J. BRISBEN WALKER DIES AT AGE OF 83; Gained Note as Newspaper Editor and Publisher of Cosmopolitan Magazine". The New York Times. July 8, 1931.
  27. ^ a b "Wallace Pratt". U.S. National Park Service. Retrieved January 20, 2026.
  28. ^ "Ship on the Desert". U.S. National Park Service. Retrieved January 20, 2026.
  29. ^ "Memorial" (PDF). American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin. 66 (9): 1412–1422. September 1982.
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